A transcription of a part of the BG course 
given by HH Hridayananda Maharaja at GTU, September 1996. 

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As I mentioned earlier, when Hindus struggled to reach the universal 
definition what is the common feature that makes everyone who is a Hindu a 
Hindu, they finally agreed at least on this that you accept the authority of 
the Vedas, of the Vedic literature - then you are a Hindu. And so this 
literature is complex. The word `veda' means simply `knowledge' in Sanskrit. 
It comes from one of the Sanskrit roots `to know' which is `vid.' So Veda 
simply means knowledge. And the Vedic literature comprises various levels 
which are understood generally in terms of chronology, history and also in 
terms of subject matter.

So what is accepted in the tradition and by everybody as the oldest level of 
this Vedic literature, and what is sometimes called the Vedas, the four Vedas, 
technically called Samhitas, or collections, is the Rg Veda. The word Rg in 
Sanskrit (actually the original word is "rc") simply means a hymn. So the Rg 
Veda is a collection of hymns which were generally offered to the gods. It's 
normally taken as polytheism or henotheism. Max Mueller uses the word 
henotheism in a sense that there is a notion of one God, but that one God 
manifests in different forms, as opposed to simply thinking there are many 
gods. Because even the Rg Veda says that the Truth is one but the sages call 
it by different names. Also in this Rg Veda you have hymns to Visnu and there 
is a statement that there is a supreme abode of Visnu and all the godly people 
are always beholding or looking towards that supreme abode of Visnu. So people 
within the Hindu tradition have always asserted that the Veda is not simply 
polytheistic, it recognizes various manifestations of God, but there is one 
truth ultimately - alluded to or directly enunciated. So there is the Rg Veda 
which is considered the oldest.

The next oldest - not next oldest, but in the next level - is Yajur Veda. 
`Yaj' of course in Sanskrit is a root for `sacrifice' and `Yajur' means the 
sacrificial formulas. The idea is that as you find in the ancient Greece and 
in the other ancient traditions of the middle East, the Vedas were about 
sacrifice. Sacrifice was the science, the technology - whether they wanted to 
accomplish some spiritual end or some material goal, it was done through a 
fire sacrifice which was tended by priest and certain sacred mantras were 
chanted. It was considered that these mantras or sounds had the power to do 
anything in the world if you knew the right sound. Of course, Europeans tend 
to look upon this as primitive, but you could also look upon these sounds as 
types of icons like you find on computer screens, and there was the idea that 
different sounds actually match up with or link to various objects in the 
universe - planets, people or whatever. And through understanding this subtle 
science one could actually effect almost anything in the world.

So the actual mantras which were chanted at the sacrifices were contained in 
the Rg Veda, that's what `Rg' means, it means the mantras or the hymns; the 
formulas how you do the sacrifice, when you do them, what kind of priest you 
require or what season and for what purpose and so on. This was explained in 
the Yajur Veda.

There was another Veda called the Sama Veda. `Sama' means the type of melody 
or hymn which was the musical aspect. It didn't have descriptions for 
orchestras or anything but things were chanted musically. And the Sama Veda 
basically repeats the hymns of the Rg Veda and explains how to chant them in 
beautiful ways.

Finally there was one fourth Veda which was somewhat like a step child, the 
Atharva Veda, which had some of the same materials of Rg Veda, but also had 
all kinds of mantras you could chant to do evil to other people or to get 
positive things, to get a particular wife or a husband or a child, a horse or 
particular neighbors or something like that. So because the Atharva Veda got a 
little bit into this somewhat dark side or mysticism, you often find that the 
Vedas are described throughout the literature as `trai' which means `three'. 
So there are four Vedas but often the Vedas were talked about as three because 
the Rg, Yajur and Sama Veda had a certain unified higher religious purpose and 
the Atharva Veda was a little bit on the border.

Now what happened is that these Vedas according to the tradition were divided 
by a great sage named Vyasa who is also I think mentioned in the Bhagavad- 
gita. It's said that as this age began, the present age of Kali, in which 
people were going to be less intelligent and somewhat fallen, the Vedas were 
divided into the present form, made simpler, and each one of the four Vedas 
was given to a particular sage and those sages, of course, had their own 
disciples. And so you have the Vedas were transmitted and preserved 
historically by these Veda-shaka. `Shaka' in Sanskrit means branch. So these 
shakas, or branches, of the Vedas were actual communities of people that 
spread throughout India - North and South, East and West, - and a particular 
community would preserve a particular Veda and discourse upon it and develop 
it in various ways which I will explain. And what happened is that each one of 
the four Vedas branched out into subbranches, and so you have thousands of 
subbranches of the Vedas each one again preserved by communities which were 
families and not only families, but communities. And the way they developed 
the Vedas were that they developed another kind of literature which is called 
the Brahmana literature. These caretakers of the Vedas were of course 
themselves brahmanas, or a priestly class, and they wrote books called the 
Brahmanas. And these books actually explain in much more detail exactly how 
you do the sacrifices, why you do them, they give some very far out 
interpretations what the sacrifices mean and all kinds of rewards you get. So 
it's shop-talk basically, that's the Brahmana literature.

Now in India, in Bengal, there were some people who were not simply satisfied 
to perform rituals because in the Vedas a lot of the rituals were meant for a 
material gain - wealth, nice family and power, fame - all usual things. So you 
have this tradition coming down, and at the same time there was the whole 
other tradition coming down - a people who felt that the real goal of life is 
not simply to worship the gods to get material things, but the goal is 
knowledge, and this knowledge ultimately is of the soul and of the Absolute 
Truth. And that even if one performs the rituals one should perform them with 
that goal in mind. So these people who felt that knowledge is the goal, they 
had their own literature, their own Vedic literature which is called the 
Upanisads. And if this is the type of chronology coming down, we had purposely 
put the Upanisads not under the Brahmana literature, but over here on the side 
for the simple reason that in Hinduism basically everyone understands that 
there are different divisions of religious life. And the word for division is 
`kanda.' And so those who interpret the religious life as sort of divine 
commerce where you pray to the gods or God and you get material benefits - 
that division is called the karma-kanda because the word karma traditionally 
in Hinduism means not merely what you are going to be in your next life, but 
karma also means activity in the sense of worldly activity - this is the main 
sense of it. So karma-kanda means the people who were studying the Vedas, 
worshiping the gods, performing sacrifices, getting material goods - that's 
all called karma-kanda. And over here you have what is called the jnana-kanda, 
or the knowledge division, people that want knowledge of the Absolute Truth 
and ultimately liberation - their goal is not to go to a material heaven but 
to get spiritual emancipation.

You may say, `How old are these things, when did these things happen?' So here 
is a quote from a book called "A history of Indian Buddhism" by H. Akira, this 
is a standard textbook in Indian Buddhism used in many universities. He says, 
"...no accurate dates for India's ancient history exist." That's encouraging. 
Then there is another book called "The Universal Gita" by Sharp and this is 
again a standard textbook. He says, "As with all ancient Hindu scriptures, 
absolute chronology cannot be arrived at by any means currently..." 

So, but if you read any book on Hinduism you will find lots of dates: this 
happened at this time, this happened at that time. So what is going on? What 
is going on is that there is, you have this set of scriptures in somewhat 
relative chronology. What scholars do is they study the Sanskrit language in 
these various books and, for example, you will note in the Rg Veda there is 
one type of Sanskrit which appears to be very much older, and when you get to 
the Brahmana literature it appears to be a more simplified form of Sanskrit. I 
will go over the grammatical details, but very briefly: in the Rg Veda the 
verb system is far more complex or with far more modes for each tense in 
Sanskrit, there are various declensions which you don't find later, and even 
some verb tenses which you don't find later. So it's actually more complex 
language that gets simplified into the Brahmana literature, and somewhat more 
simplified in the Upanisads.

But the point the scholars neglect is that in the case of the Vedas it was 
actually the sound itself which produced the effect. In other words, it's 
somewhat mechanistic. It's not a question of devotion, it's not a question of 
your love for God. If you just chant the mantras properly and perform the 
sacrifice properly the God in effect have to give you what you want. And this 
became the dominant understanding gradually in India by mimamsa school. It's 
like if you pay the price or you push the button it has to come out. If it 
doesn't, you can get your money back or demand that you get your product.

And so therefore scholars considered this to be the greatest memorization in a 
sense you have these long books, the Vedas, in a very sophisticated form of 
Sanskrit which actually became incomprehensible even thousands of years ago to 
people in India. And these Vedas were chanted, there wasn't writing down, and 
so you had a whole complex system of three different accents which told to 
reciter exactly how to chant the Vedas, and they managed to preserve this for 
thousands and thousands of years until down the last syllable, and not only 
down the last syllable but down to the last accent on the syllable. And so 
scholars felt it's like a tape-recording. If you hear the Rg Veda chanting 
it's practically tape-recording of what was going on many, many thousands of 
years ago.

So in the case of the Vedas the accent or the exact pronunciation was 
everything. To give one simple example there is one story where one priest got 
really mad at Indra, and therefore performed a sacrifice to create a type of 
monster that could kill Indra. And so therefore he said, when he did this 
sacrifice what he wanted was indra-satru (satru in Sanskrit means enemy). He 
wanted to create an enemy of Indra. But unfortunately there are different 
kinds of compounds. Indra-satru can mean the enemy of Indra, but if you put 
the accent on the other word it means person for whom Indra is the enemy. In 
other words, a person who will be killed by Indra. And so simply because he 
put one accent on the wrong word he got the opposite result, he created the 
monster who was killed by Indra. So that's how serious they took the accents.

Therefore you have this very ancient culture on the ritual side - what counts 
is the physical pronunciation. Therefore they tenaciously preserved it, but on 
the knowledge side... I remember a philosophy course I took in (?), and the 
first thing they told us was, "When you write your papers we don't care about 
the language and style. Just get your argument out there." Through the 
knowledge side the point was the knowledge. What is God, what is the Absolute, 
what is the soul. There was no concern really on this side to get the 
pronunciation right. Therefore you have a knowledge tradition coming down and 
it gets only at the point of writing the stories several thousand years ago, 
whereas in the Veda side it gets (?) from the very beginning because the 
pronunciation is everything. Therefore this gives the impression of one being 
older. But actually according to the tradition itself and, I think, common 
sense and a sense of my own view is that actually there were always people who 
thought there was more to life than performing rituals to get a lot of cows 
and be famous in the village.

So anyway, so that's coming down to the Upanisads, and then there is some 
other literature, I won't make it too technical. There are other literatures 
also. But basically all of this gets called the Vedic literature in a 
technical sense because you have the Vedas, you have the Brahmanas 
interpreting the Vedas, the Upanisads also, talking about knowledge in Vedic 
terms. All this becomes called the Vedic literature.

Then at certain point you get a completely new kind of literature also 
announced in the cannon itself. The way they describe themselves is Itihasa, 
or history. The word Itihasa technically means, iti means "thus", ha means "in 
the past;" iti hasa - "it was", "thus it was in the past" or "indeed it was in 
the past". These are the famous epics of India like Mahabharata and Ramayana.

So now you have these literatures Ramayana and Mahabharata occurring, and then 
after that you get another genre of literature called the Puranas. Purana 
means "ancient" in Sanskrit and these are also Lord's words that tell all 
kinds of stories.

Now, there is one major controversy and it's a sort of cold war what is going 
on now between Western scholars and people within the Hindu tradition. And 
that is that within the Hindu tradition everyone agrees that all of this is a 
single continuing revelation and that the Puranas are as much Vedic literature 
as anything up here, it's all Vedic literature, it's all Vedic culture, it's a 
single continuing revelation, it's an united culture. Whereas the Western 
scholars coming in with their evolution models want to see that it's actually 
just like everywhere else, things are just changing. Although now I would say 
that the Hindu idea is kind of winning. For example, you find in the old 
Upanisads mentions of Puranas and mentions of Itihasas. So this genre of 
telling stories was apparently very ancient. And also there are just so many 
similarities that people is trying to understand that yes, this is probably a 
single united culture which adopted itself and changed according to the 
circumstances but which has a central message.

Getting back to the point, how do you date all this? How do you make any 
historical sense out of all of this?

What does seem to be clear is that there are certainly levels of language, and 
this is stated even in the literature itself. The literature itself says that 
certain things were written first and certain things were written later or 
revealed later. And so the Vedas are very archaic language - thousands of 
years - but people can't understand it, require commentary to understand. You 
do get a gradual simplification or clarification of the Sanskrit language 
until at the time of the Mahabharata the language is significantly simpler and 
into the Puranas. So a relative chronology as I said with some footnotes as 
exceptions because on this side things are kind of frozen from the very 
beginning because of technical requirements. So with those types of 
qualifications you can't conceive the type of relative chronology... in 
relative chronology things relate to each other in a certain way, coming down.

Now the issue becomes, in historiography, how do you take these relative 
chronology and fit it, map it on to the world with actual dates. Of course 
when you get to the certain period down here it starts to become historical 
because we start to get all kinds of references to certain kings and events 
that everyone knows about. So this is not really a problem. But before that 
what scholars had tended to do is they tend to seize upon what they feel is 
certain island of absolute chronology in the sea of uncertainty, and that is 
Buddha and Buddhism. A hundred or two hundred years after Buddha there was 
great king named Asoka, who either became a Buddhist or taught it was a real 
nice thing that everybody should know about. So Asoka politically was a very 
powerful emperor, and had the good idea that we should actually write these 
things down, we should engrave them in stone. So he erected pillars all over 
the place. These pillars inscribed in stone began appearing everywhere at the 
same time according to the Western scholars. Writing became prominent and 
different kinds of scripts. And so you have this pillar inscriptions which 
give the Buddha-dharma or the principles of Buddhism and that becomes a pretty 
sure thing. That's about let's say 300 B.C.

So now this is a trick. Once you nail this down... Now by philology and not by 
any hard evidence, by philology you read these other books and you decide, 
"Well, this must have been before Buddhism, that must have come after 
Buddhism." But this is very tricky because, for example H. Akira in his book 
of history of Indian Buddhism which is [indistinct] the standard textbook on 
Indian Buddhism, he said that one of the reasons that Buddhism did not survive 
in India as it did in another places, is because it so quickly became 
assimilated, that from the beginning it took on a lot of the cultural 
paraphernalia, a lot of the basic ideas, like karma, reincarnation and so on 
from their host environment.

So they say the Upanisads must have come earlier, before Buddhism. Now, how 
earlier? How much earlier? No one knows. So therefore they say, "Well, let's 
say hundred-two hundred years earlier." Why? Well, there is not good reason 
for it. They just say, "Let's say that." In fact Max Mueller, this great 
indologist, came up with these ideas around the turn of century and he himself 
was criticized, and he said that "I never said this was right." He said, "I've 
already said that I agreed fully with all of my critics." So in the indology 
inside room, so to speak, everyone admits they don't have even a slightest 
idea when these things were written. But you have to tell the public 
something, the show must go on.

If you take it that the Upanisads were a few hundred years before Buddha, and 
there is not good reason to say that, but let's say just to go on with it, 
then if the Brahmana literatures were written in earlier form of Sanskrit 
let's give that another couple of hundred years. Why? Well, because there is 
not good reason. They call this glottochronology. Glotto, of course, referring 
to language. Glottochronology is simply how long it takes to languages to 
change. Languages, of course, are seen as universal feature of human culture. 
Again, no external evidence, no internal references with any book, no 
archeology, zero, just let's give it a couple of hundreds of years. So that's 
what happened. The funny thing is that the Sanskrit is actually the most 
conservative language. But that's how the chronology is done.

...And based on that hundreds and millions of people have to accept that all 
their sacred beliefs were wrong because someone has got a feeling that...